Truth about persons is grasped a priori, not discovered by empirical search

Evidence

Its point of departure is experience; its pillar of support is the fundamental, pre-ontological comprehension which man has of the human person. Although the majority of people can well ignore the indications contained in a gesture, a word, a sign and can look with scorn on the revelation which they carry, each human individual nevertheless possesses a priori the meaning of the revelatory value of these manifestations and is capable of deciphering them, at least if he is aided and guided by a helping hand. Here as elsewhere, truth is not encountered by chance; it does not belong to a domain where one must seek it without ever having any presentiment of its location, as one can go to look for the source of the Nile or of the Niger. It belongs a priori to human comprehension and the essential task is an hermeneutic; that is, a deciphering, a determination, and a conceptualization. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1336

Categorization

• DEFINE: The hermeneutic, a-priori-epistemic frame of existential psychoanalysis vs. empirical discovery.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that human truth is pre-comprehended rather than empirically unearthed — rejecting the ‘source of the Nile’ model of knowing persons — is a dense reorientation of what understanding a person means.
• XREF: connects to: Empirical psychoanalysis cannot explain why the subject recognizes the truth of its interpretations — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1344; Comprehending the interrelation of experienced facts shatters false realism — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 801; Procedural ethics cannot justify principles without empirical accounts of persons — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 426 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Empirical psychoanalysis cannot explain why the subject recognizes the truth of its interpretations #corroborates (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1344
• Comprehending the interrelation of experienced facts shatters false realism #corroborates (0.72) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 801